![]() There’s a lot of terrain there, remote areas where the plane could have crashed.”Īfter the Alaska crash, Congress mandated that general aviation aircraft carry an ELT, or emergency locator transmitter. It’s almost impossible to simply crisscross such a large area in low-flying planes and boats. On Thursday, authorities said they planned to look farther west toward the Indian Ocean. On Wednesday, Malaysian authorities broadened the search area to 27,000 nautical square miles, nearly doubling its size. In the case of the Malaysia Airlines flight, the search area has continued to expand rather than contract – something that experts say does not bode well for the likelihood of finding the plane. Officials deny Malaysia Airlines jet kept flying for hours The recovery operation included 48 aircraft, but no sign of the plane was ever found. ![]() In 1962, a Flying Tiger Line Lockheed Constellation operating as a military transport disappeared over the Pacific after taking off from Guam. In addition to the 1972 Alaska crash, other aircraft have gone missing without a trace. In that case, a plane could continue undetected even in areas covered by radar. It’s possible for a plane to literally fly under the radar because coverage usually doesn’t go all the way down to the surface. And even the radar can only provide so much information. It can’t identify the plane or give an altitude. But without the plane’s transponder working, that target tracked by radar is only “skinpaint,” or the reflection of a dense object. Military radar can cover areas not covered by civilian air traffic control. Military radar tracked unidentified targets that could have been Flight 370 heading west toward the Strait of Malacca and possibly beyond. “Then they started exploring other possibilities,” Griffin said. At first, the search area focused on the plane’s intended flight path, as officials went on the assumption that the plane did not change course. At that point, air traffic controllers in Kuala Lampur had no more contact with the aircraft. Malaysia Flight 370’s transponder stopped broadcasting about 45 minutes into the flight. Primary radar can also pick up debris that might be raining down from an in-flight explosion, and in such cases a target that appears as one object suddenly appears as several objects. ![]() “If you work at an ATC (Air Traffic Control) facility on an East Coast flyway, you will pick up flocks of birds,” Griffin said. Primary radar doesn’t give any information about the object it’s tracking. One is primary radar, what’s sometimes called “skinpaint,” that simply reflects off an object. “There are basically two ways to find a plane – radar and pilot communication.” “It’s very important,” said John Griffin II, an associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who specializes in air traffic control. Such images are rare, and typically, when a plane goes down in a remote area with no witnesses, one of the most crucial tools available to investigators is radar. In the case of Malaysia Flight 370, a Boeing 777 missing since Saturday, a search of an area captured by Chinese satellite images that seemed to pinpoint the crash site turned up nothing.
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